Les Cayes. Pinchinat returns in triumph.

Rigaud gave the civil commission an account of the events at Les Cayes and asked it to send other delegates into the South. Pinchinat, having learned what had happened, left his retreat and came back to Les Cayes, where he was carried in triumph by the people (5 September). Sonthonax, not wishing to exasperate Rigaud, who had shown how far his power could reach, sent into the South as representatives of the civil commission two men of color, the brigadier generals Martial Besse and A. Chanlatte. But he represented Rigaud to the French government as a traitor working to make himself independent of the metropole. General Bauvais was charged with gathering serious information on the events at Les Cayes and reporting on them to the civil commission. The generals of color Martial Besse and Chanlatte went into the South bearing a decree recalling the members of the delegation. Kerverseau and Leborgne left Les Cayes carrying with them the curses of the population. On the delegates’ reports, the civil commission wrote to the Directory “that Pinchinat and Augustin Rigaud insinuated to the Black people that the whites newly arrived from Europe had come back only to put them in irons again, and that it was time to exterminate them so as to have nothing more to fear from them; that the whites had never sincerely wanted the liberty of the Black people or of the men of color; that the men of color and the Black people were the true inhabitants, the real proprietors of the colonies; that everything belonged to them, and that the whites must be exterminated or driven out.”